Adams Avenue Street Fair: September 29th & 30th
The San Diego street fair scene is a popular one, boasting a calendar as full and as robust as can be imagined, given the world's most perfect climate. Framing the season with both pre-Memorial Day and post-Labor Day events are fairs sponsored by the Adams Avenue Business Association featuring as many arts, crafts, and food vendors, performances stages, and happy, smiling patrons as eight blocks of Adams Avenue can contain.
The last weekend of September (the 29th & 30th) bids summer a final, rockin' farewell with the somewhat less adventurously named Adams Avenue Street Fair. The fair will provide copious amounts of music…with as many as 75 bands set to grace the stages this year. Throw free admission into the mix and there's just no excuse not to take part in the festivities along with upwards of 100,000 revelers sharing in the fun over the course of the 2-day event. Giant carnival rides and assorted children's activities are available for a family-oriented experience, while some three hundred vendors – supplemented by three beer gardens, cater to the kind of powerful thirst anyone is liable to cultivate while keeping up with the sounds of the rock, blues, funk, swing, reggae, and soul outfits spread over the Fair's six different stages.
In addition to the grilled sausage and gyro merchants, there is always an eclectic array of local businesses with booths at the Adams Avenue Street Fair. Morning shower not all it should be? The folks from Culligan Water Filters will be there just waiting for you to pay them a visit; beautiful skin is yours for asking at the L'Bel Paris booth; while the vintners from PRP Wine already have something fermenting in a bottle waiting for you to take back home with you for immediate uncorking.
Artists and art dealers from all over the region come to the Adams Avenue Street Fair to display their talents and the talents of those from as far away as Bali, Morocco, East Africa, and Southeast Asia over the course of the two day event.
And if all that were not enough, adding to the excitement of this Fall's 26th annual Fair will be the raffle of a Martin D-16GT guitar (value: $1,350) from the Hawley Boulevard Blues Stage on Sunday, September 30th at five o'clock: the proceeds going to benefit the Fair itself. Raffle tickets are $3 each (4 for $10) and are available at over a dozen San Diego locations (see The Adams Avenue Street Fair website for a list of locations).
Long an enclave for area aesthetes, Ray Street plays host to a gathering of the artistic, the inspired, the imaginative, and the merely curious eager to rub elbows with the creative element in this nocturnal celebration. Convened on the 2nd Saturday of each month in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood, and located between University Avenue and North Park Way, the PM gallery walk takes place between the hours of 6 PM and 10 PM. It affords access to as many as a dozen venues with live entertainment, food vendors, and even finger food and glasses of wine made available in galleries themselves (in exchange for a small donation).